Let me start with a little background info. I manage a computer lab with 85 workstations. I ocassionally use either RDP or VNC to do some maintenance. I have no problem doing this from windows, but I wanted my lonely Ubuntu workstation to be able to do the same thing. After about a week of research I am finally able to ping my windows workstations via their Netbios names. Woohoo!!

All you have to do is:

edit /etc/nsswitch.conf

change the line that says

hosts: files dns

to this:

hosts: files wins dns

(order does matter)

finally, you need to install winbind

Code:

sudo apt-get install winbind

that's all that it took for me.

now ping <hostname> works great. And I can finally use the built-in terminal server client with hostnames instead of IP addresses.

I hope this brief guide can be of help! Thank you all for always providing such great support in these forums!